The Iliad

NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION

(Here and throughout the Pronouncing Glossary that follows, line numbers refer to the translation, where the line numbers of the Greek text will be found at the top of every page.)

1.1 Goddess: the Muse who personifies the inspiration for epic poetry.

1.1 Peleus’ son Achilles: Achilles is the son of a mortal father and a divine mother, the sea goddess Thetis. Zeus was once in love with her but was warned that she would bear a son stronger than his father. So it was decided that she should wed a mortal. (See 18.97-101, 504-7, 24.72-76, 625-27, and note 24.35-36.) She later departed from Peleus, however, and went to live with her father, the Old Man of the Sea. According to one legend, she had attempted to make Achilles immortal by dipping him, as a child, in the water of the river Styx. But the heel by which she held him remained vulnerable, and it was there that later the arrow of Paris found its mark. See notes 19.494, 24.545.

1.45 Smintheus: ancient commentators disagreed about the meaning of this name of Apollo. Some derived it from Sminthe, a nearby town; others from the Mysian (non-Greek) word (sminthos) = mouse, and it is known that there was a festival in Rhodes called Smintheia, in honor of Apollo and Dionysus because they were thought to kill the mice that damaged the new vines.

1.53 The arrows clanged at his back: the arrows of Apollo are a metaphor for the onset of a plague.

1.273 This scepter: the scepter is passed by the heralds to anyone in the assembly who wishes to speak—while he holds it, he has the floor. It is a symbol of royal and divine authority, and also stands for the rule of law and due process in the community. It is not the same as Agamemnon’s own royal scepter (2.118-26), which has come down to him from Zeus through several generations of Argive kings.

1.312 Centaurs: the Centaurs were a race of (literally) horse-men: half horse, half man. They were feared for their violence—all except one, Chiron, who was a healer and taught many heroes (see 4.2 51-52), including Achilles (see 11. 992-94), the arts of medicine.

1.470-83 Your claims in father’s halls: this story of the near defeat of Zeus by Hera, Poseidon and Athena (incidentally, they are the three gods most passionately hostile to Troy in the Iliad) is unique in the rich variety of myths about the Olympian gods in that Zeus is almost defeated. It seems likely that Homer invented the story himself, to provide Thetis with a claim on Zeus’s gratitude.

1.505 Ocean River: in the Homeric imagination, Ocean is a river that, rising from sources in the west, encircles the whole world. All the rivers of the world flow from it, connected often by subterranean channels. See Introduction, p. 63.

1.534-58 The sacrifice for Apollo: what happens in the following passage is a sacrifice to the gods which is also a feast for the human worshippers (this was the way meat was eaten in the ancient world). The cattle are arranged around the altar, and the sacrificers wash their hands to establish purity for the ritual. They scatter barley on the victims, then pull back their heads and cut their throats over the altar. The animal’s skin is then taken off and a portion prepared for the gods. This is a choice portion, the meat of the thighbones: it is wrapped in a double fold of fat and the outside covered with small pieces of meat from different parts of the animal. This portion is then burned over the fire—the smoke and savor go up to the gods above. Wine is poured over it, a libation. The sacrificers then begin their meal—with the entrails, which they have roasted on forks over the fire, They then carve the carcass and roast portions of meat on spits and set them out for the feast.

1.596 Crouching down at his feet: Thetis assumes the position of the suppliant—kneeling, clasping the knees of the person supplicated, reaching up to his (or her) chin. It is a gesture that symbolizes the utter helplessness of the suppliant, his abject dependence, but at the same time applies a physical and moral constraint on the person so addressed. (See Introduction, p. 52.) The Greeks believed that Zeus was the protector and champion of suppliants.

1.712 He seized my foot: Hephaestus, the smith-god, is lame. This may be a reflection of the fact that in a community where agriculture and war are the predominant features in the life of its men, someone with weak legs and strong arms would probably become a blacksmith. He seems to have been lame from birth: at 18.461-64 he says that his mother, Hera, threw him out of Olympus because of this defect. The fall referred to here was probably a consequence of his attempt to help Hera when Zeus had hung her up from Mount Olympus with a pair of anvils tied to her feet. See 15.23-31 and note 18.462.

1.715 The mortals there: Homer identifies them as the Sintians. Lemnos was a center of the cult of Hephaestus; it was an island noted for its volcanic gas.

2.86 Time-honored custom: the Greek word used here, themis, describes conduct that is usual and proper. It seems unlikely that commanders normally made a discouraging, not to say despairing, speech to their troops when preparing to take the offensive, but that is what the word suggests.

2.121 The giant-killing Guide: in the Greek, two regular epithets of Hermes. He is called the guide or escort (the meaning of the word is disputed) because he is often sent by Zeus to act in that role, as in Book 24, when he escorts Priam to the tent of Achilles. The other epithet refers to the fact that, at the request of Zeus, he killed a monster of immense strength called Argos, who had eyes all over his body, so that he could keep some of them open when he slept. He was killed because Hera had sent him to guard Io, a woman Zeus was in love with, whom Hera had changed into a cow.

2.130 Madness, blinding ruin: the Greek word for this is Ate. The meanings of the word range from “delusion,” “infatuation,” “madness,” to the “ruin,” “disaster,” “doom” that the mood can bring about. In 19.106-57 Atê is personified: Zeus, led astray by her, threw her out of Olympus, so that now she works among men. See Introduction, pp. 50, 54.

2.422-23 Payment in full for the groans ... I we have all borne for Helen: the line could refer to vengeance for the struggles and groans of Helen—a vision of Helen as an unwilling victim of Paris, which is not found elsewhere in the poem. The ancient critic Aristarchus understood it to mean “the struggles and groans because of Helen,” and we have followed his interpretation.

2.529 Her awesome shield of storm: this is the aegis (literally “goatskin”). It is sometimes displayed by Zeus himself, and by Apollo, as well as by Athena. Its shape is not easily determined from the text: at one point it seems to be a shield, for the figure of the Gorgon’s head and other forms of terror appear on it. In any case, its effect seems to be to stiffen morale in the armies it is raised to protect and inspire terror in those who face it.

2.748 Heracles is the greatest of the Greek heroes; he eventually, after his death, became an immortal god. He was the son of Zeus and a mortal woman, Alcmena (14.387-88). Zeus intended that he should “lord it over all who dwell around him,” but Zeus’s jealous wife, Hera, contrived to have that destiny conferred on Eurystheus, king of Argos, to whom Heracles was to be subject (19.112- 57). At Eurystheus’ command, Heracles performed the famous twelve labors: among them was the capture of the three-headed dog, Cerberus, the guardian of the entrance to the underworld (8.419-21). For the story of his sack of Troy, many years before the Trojan War, see 14.300-8, 5.733-38 and note ad loc. Homer refers twice to his participation in battles at Pylos (5.446-62, 11.818- 19): the passage in Book 5 has him wounding Hera and Hades, a story that does not appear elsewhere and that Homer may have invented (see note 5.434- 62). Homer attributes Heracles’ death to “Hera’s savage anger” (18.141, see note 15.32-39), but in other poets’ versions of his death Hera plays no part.

2.826 The Argives would recall Philocietes: this refers to a well-known story about the final phase of the war. The Achaeans, unable to take Troy, learned of a prophecy that they would be able to do so only with the aid of Philoctetes and his bow, a famous weapon that he had inherited from Heracles. They had to send an embassy to Lemnos to persuade him to come and help them. This embassy is the subject of Sophocles’ tragedy Philoctetes.

2.858 Oath-stream of the gods: the river Styx, the main river of the underworld, was the guarantor of oaths sworn by the gods. Any one of the gods, Hesiod tells us (Theogony 793-806), who pours a libation of the river’s water and swears falsely is paralyzed for one year and for nine years after that is excluded from the feasts and assemblies of the gods.

3.77-81 The lovely gifts l of golden Aphrodite: see note 24.35-36 concerning the Judgment of Paris.

3.118 Such limited vengeance: we follow here the interpretation of algos (“hurt”) and phroneô (“I intend”) suggested by Kirk on 3.97-110 of the Greek (1985, pp. 276-77).

3.174 The Scaean Gates: not only the main gates of Troy but the scene of several lethal actions, including the death of Achilles beyond the compass of the poem but foreseen by Hector at 22.424.

3.247 Once in the past: in a last-minute attempt to avoid the war, Menelaus and Odysseus came to address the Trojan assembly, urging them to restore Helen to her husband. The Trojans refused; furthermore, as we learn later (11.161- 64), one of them, Antimachus, even told the assembly that they should kill Menelaus then and there.

3.332 You beneath the ground: presumably the Furies. See 19.305-6.

3.386 Greaves: tin or leather armor that covered the leg below the knee, worn by fighters to protect them from arrows and salvos of rocks and also from being chafed by the lower edge of their shields. See 6.136-37.

4.8 Boeotian Athena, guard of armies: Athena here (and at 5.1052) is given an epithet that connects her with her cult at Alalcomenae in Boeotia.

4.24 Plotting Troy’s destruction: for Hera’s and Athena’s hatred of Troy, see Introduction, p. 41, and note 24.35-36.

4.117 Wolf-god: Lukêgenês in Greek—its meaning is disputed. Lukos is the normal Greek word for “wolf,” but some scholars would rather connect the title with the place name Lycia (Lukia in Greek).

4.345-56 Nestor’s speech to his charioteers seems to envisage a charge against the enemy, something that never happens in the poem. The passage seems to preserve the memory of a time when massed chariot charges were the decisive element in land battles. See Introduction, p. 25, and note 2.61-64.

4.432 Passageways of battle: the Greek words are not fully understood. The word rendered “passageways” means “bridges” in later Greek: elsewhere in Homer it seems to mean something like “embankments” or “causeways.” An ancient note explains it as “ways through the battle lines”—the clear spaces between the ranks or formations of troops.

4.433-6 Tydeus: the father of Diomedes was one of the Seven against Thebes and was killed in the unsuccessful assault on the city. Here we are given a story of a previous visit to Thebes, in which he came off victorious. The story is repeated, with some differences of detail, at 5.921-31 and referred to at 10.334- 41. See notes 4.472, 5.926.

4.459-60 The Greek names translated as “Hunter,” “Bloodlust,” etc. are probably “significant names”: i.e., names invented or selected by the poet for their obvious suggestiveness (e.g., “Bloodlust” in Greek is Haimon and the Greek word for blood is haima). See note 18.43-56.

4.472 We are the ones: after the failure of the assault by the Seven against Thebes, their sons, among them Diomedes and Sthenelus, attacked the city in their turn, this time successfully.

4.597 Third-born of the gods: this is a literal rendering of Athena’s title Tritogeneia, but the meaning of the word is disputed. Some ancient sources connect it with Lake Tritonis in Libya, where Zeus sent Athena to be reared, or with the river Triton in Boeotia. A modern explanation compares the Athenian Tritopateres. i.e., genuine ancestors: this would give the meaning “genuine daughter of Zeus.”

5.lff. From time to time Homer inserts, in his account of the general melee, the preeminent deeds of one particular hero: such an excursus is known as an aristeia (from the Greek word aristos, “best”). Book 5 and the opening section of Book 6 constitute the aristeia of Diomedes: it is the longest and most murderous of all, except for that of Achilles in Books 20-22.

5.5 The star that flames at harvest: the Dog Star, Sirius; see note 22.35.

5.294 Ganymede: one of the three sons of Tros. the first king of Troy. He was “the handsomest mortal man on earth” (20.269), and Zeus carried him off to Olympus to be the cup-bearer and wine-pourer of the gods. For the genealogy of the Trojan royal line, see Aeneas’ account in 20.248-79, note ad loc and the Genealogy, p. 617.

5.434-62 Dione comforts Aphrodite by pointing out that she is not the only god to be wounded by a mortal. Ares was imprisoned in a bronze cauldron by the young giants Ephialtes and Otus, and almost died before he was rescued by Hermes. Hera and Hades, the Death-god, were both wounded by Heracles, Hades apparently in the course of a battle at Pylos. None of these legends appears in other sources, and the ancient commentators were evidently puzzled by them. Homer may have invented them for the occasion. See note 2.748.

5.733-38 What they say of mighty Heracles: Heracles rescued the daughter of Laomedon, Hesione, from a sea monster sent by Poseidon. His reward was to be the famous horses of Laomedon, but the king refused to pay. Heracles took and sacked the city.

5.859-61 The gates of heaven: i.e., of Olympus, the house of the gods, consist, naturally enough, of clouds, and clouds are thought of as controlled by the Seasons of the year. So here they are, so to speak, the gate-keepers.

5.926 The message into Thebes: Adrastus, king of Argos, gave shelter to Polynices, son of Oedipus of Thebes, and organized an army (led by seven champions, the “Seven against Thebes”) to restore him to the throne of Thebes, from which he had been expelled by his brother Eteocles. Tydeus, later one of the Seven, was sent with a demand that Eteocles give up his throne to Polynices.

5.976 Helmet of Death: this helmet, which made its wearer invisible, is attributed to the Death-god, Hades, because his name in Greek, Aïdês, was thought to mean “the unseen one” (a = “not,” and the root ^*id = “see”).

5.1017-18 You gave her birth I from your own head: according to legend, Zeus made love with Metis, a Titaness; she conceived a daughter, and Mother Earth prophesied that if Metis conceived again she would bear a son, who would dethrone his father. So Zeus swallowed her whole and then was seized with a raging headache; Hephaestus split his skull with an ax, and Athena sprang to light, full-blown, from Zeus’s forehead.

6.153 Maenads: literally “madwomen.” They are the female devotees of the god Dionysus, who range the hills in ecstasy, carrying the thyrsus (the “sacred stave”), a staff wreathed with ivy and topped by a pine cone.

6.157-60 And Dionysus was terrified: Homer’s picture of a frightened Dionysus taking refuge with Thetis is very different from the terrifying figure of the god presented in Euripides’ play The Bacchae.

6.385 This anger: commentators have wondered why Paris should be angry and proposed various solutions (for example, that the anger is that of the Trojans against Paris), but Paris’ reply “from anger ... at our people” (396-97) is clear enough. Hector thinks Paris is sulking because he senses the resentment of his fellow Trojans and is angry with them.

7.386-95 A single great barrow ... a landward wall: see 7.503-11, 12.4-42, Introduction, p. 38, and notes 9.78, 14.35-44.

7.523-25 Those ramparts I and Apollo l reared for Troy in the old days: Apollo and Poseidon, as a punishment for their part in a revolt against Zeus, were sent to work for a year at the orders of Laomedon, king of Troy, Priam’s father. While Apollo acted as a shepherd to the king’s flocks, Poseidon built a wall around the city. At the end of the year, Laomedon cheated the two gods of the wages he had promised. Poseidon reminds Apollo of this in 21.505-22.

8.45 Nothing I said was meant in earnest: Zeus tones down the violence of his previous statement to the gods as he speaks to his favorite daughter, but of course he has not changed his mind.

8.82 Fates of death: the Greek word is kêrês. A kêr was a man’s individual fate, especially his death. Sometimes the word is used impersonally to mean death or doom, and sometimes a kêr is a personified spirit of death, as on the shield of Achilles, 18.623.

8.149 Irreversible chaos: because Zeus’s promise to Thetis would have been broken, the will of Zeus thwarted, if Diomedes’ triumphant advance had continued.

8.331 Tripod: a large pot or cauldron standing on three legs so it can straddle a fire. Often highly ornamented for presentation as a gift or prize, its metal construction made it unusually valuable and rare.

8.399 Or Ares’: we translate the reading of the ancient critic Zenodotus (êe = “or”) rather than the reading of most manuscripts, and the Oxford Classical Text (êdt = “and”), at line 349 in the Greek.

8.334 Cronus and Iapetus: the two most important of the Titans, the family of the gods that ruled before Zeus and the Olympians. (Cronus was the father of Zeus, Iapetus of Prometheus.) Zeus and his brothers and sisters overthrew Cronus and the Titans in a ten years’ war: the Titans were all confined in Tartarus, the lowest depths of the world of the dead. See note 14.244.

9.73-75 These lines (63-64 in the Greek), obviously proverbial in expression, have been thought out of place here: what is their exact reference? And why the mention of civil war? But Nestor, though he must press Agamemnon to make a conciliatory move toward Achilles, must not go too far: Agamemnon is still a powerful king, a dangerous enemy. So his remarks are general—he could be attributing the danger of dissension, even fighting, among the Achaeans to Achilles, to Agamemnon, or to both of them.

9.78 The trench we dug ouuide the rampart: Homer’s description of the wall and the ditch is unclear, even confusing at times. Here it seems that the Achaeans had left a level space between the rampart and the ditch: it is in this that the sentries are to take their posts.

9.176 Bride-price: expensive gifts offered by the suitor to the bride’s father. This seems to have been the normal custom in heroic times (see, for example, 16.209, 16.225 and 22.555), but it is here combined with the later custom—a dowry offered by the bride’s father.

9.505 Death will not come on me quickly: this line, which repeats in different wording the thought of the previous line, was condemned by two of the great Alexandrian editors of the lliad, Zenodotus and Aristarchus, as an interpolation.

9.558-62 These lines (458-61 in the Greek) are not to be found in the manuscript tradition. Plutarch, writing in the first century A.D., quotes them and adds that Aristarchus, the most severe of the Alexandrian editors, expunged them, because he was shocked by them (if that is what Plutarch’s word phobêtheis means in this context).

9.646-729 The story of Meleager, as we know it from later sources, is very different from Homer’s version. Elsewhere (in Aeschylus and Bacchylides, for example) Althaea was told by the fates that her newborn son Meleager would live as long as the log on the fire remained unconsumed. She took it off the fire, extinguished it and hid it in the chest. Later, when, in a quarrel over the spoils of the Calydonian hunt, Meleager killed Althaea’s brother, she put the log back in the fire and he died. Homer’s account makes Meleager’s situation such a close parallel to that of Achilles that critics have suspected that he invented it. (See Introduction, pp. 50-52, and note 9.672.) This suspicion is reinforced by the fact that Cleopatra, who urged him to go back to the battle, as Patroclus does Achilles, has a name consisting of the same two elements as Patroclus’ name (patr- and cl-), in reverse. And Homer goes out of his way to explain that Cleopatra was called by another name—Alcyone (Hatcyon)—by her parents.

9.675 Their own city walls: the language is confusing here, and interpretation disputed. We have taken the lines to mean that the Aetolians beat the Curetes back to their own walls (as the Achaeans did the Trojans before Achilles withdrew from the battle): this fortifies Phoenix’s parallel.

9.679-88 Marpessa: Idas and the god Apollo were both in love with Marpessa, and Apollo carried her off. Idas confronted him, and Zeus prevented a fight, asking Marpessa to choose between them. She chose Idas, and called her daughter Halcyon in commemoration of the time she wailed like the seabird on being parted from him,

9.741 The great decree of Zeus: we take the phrase Dios aisêi (608 in the Greek) in this sense, a reference to Zeus’s promise to Thetis to make the Achaeans regret their treatment of Achilles. Other possible interpretations are: “‘by the dispensation of Zeus’; i.e., by [Achilles‘] status and position in the world” (Willcock), “by the just measure [of Zeus]” (Leaf), “honored already in Zeus’s ordinance” (Lattimore).

9.772 Accept the blood-price: see note 18.581-92.

10.315 The lucky sign: it was lucky because the heron was on their right hand. This idea that signs on the right are lucky and on the left unlucky is common in many cultures and languages: our word “sinister,” for example, is the Latin word for “left.” See 12.230-39, 24.377-91.

11.4 Storm-shield: Homer does not make it clear exactly what Strife holds in her fists: we suggest that it is the aegis of Zeus. See 5.846-50 and note 2.529.

11.892 Their real father. Poseidon: like Heracles and many another Greek hero, the twin Moliones had two fathers, one human and one divine. The Greek has no equivalent of the word “real,” but it seemed called for by the situation—it is Poseidon who saves their lives.

12.61-64 There are more confused memories of war-chariots here: obviously a war-chariot pulled by horses could not leap over a wide ditch, though a man on a horse might.

12.205 Blaze of war: since fire is not much use against a rock wall, we have taken the Greek phrase as a metaphor.

13.6-8 A world away: all these peoples—Thracians, Mysians, Hippemolgi and the Abii—are located to the north of Troy.

13.14 Samos facing Thrace: the island usually known as Samothrace, not the large island of Samos off the south-central coast of Asia Minor, or the island off the western coast of Greece, part of Odysseus’ kingdom, later known as Cephallenia. See note 24.97.

13.247 [Poseidon‘s] own grandson: i.e., Amphimachus (1), whose death is described in 221-23.

13.632 The whole vein: there is of course no such vein. Aristotle, who quotes the passage (HA 513b 26-29), identifies it with the vena cava, but this vein is not near enough to the surface to be “sheared ... clear.”

13.759-60 No blood-price came his way... in battle: see note 18.581-92.

13.918 Fresh reserves just come from Ascania’s fertile soil: this passage does not square with the Catalogue in Book 2, where Ascanius and his contingent are already in place with the Achaean forces. “Once again, the normal accuracy of the poet causes us to notice a small inconsistency” (Willcock, vol. 2, p. 224).

14.35-44 The picture of the Achaean ships berthed on the beach is, at times, somewhat obscure. We have understood the lines to mean that the first ships to land (ten years before) were those of Diomedes, Odysseus and Agamemnon. They had been drawn up on the beach, “far away from the fighting”; a defensive wall was built ahead of their stems (they were positioned ready for relaunching). This is not of course the same wall as that later built around the whole of the Greek encampment (see note 7.386-95). As the next contingents arrived, they could not be accommodated in the enclosure; their crews dragged them up in rows (presumably on either side of the first ships to land) and filled the whole stretch of the bay.

14.148 One of Adrastus’ daughters: Tydeus married one of them, Polynices the other (Diomedes, son of Tydeus, married Aegialia, who was, according to some authorities, the daughter, according to others, the granddaughter, of Adrastus).

14.244 Ocean, fountainhead of the gods, and Mother Tethys: the word translated “fountainhead” suggests that Ocean and his wife Tethys were the parents of the Olympian gods. This is contrary to the standard version, Hesiod’s Theogony, an account of the genealogy of the gods, which made Ocean and Tethys children of Uranus and Gaia, like all the Titans. There, Ocean is the father of all the rivers and the springs. During the war of the Olympians and the Titans, Rhea, wife of Cronus and mother of Zeus and Hera, had sent Hera to Ocean and Tethys for safekeeping. See note 8.554.

14.356 All unknown to their parents: Zeus and Hera are incestuous brother and sister, both born of Cronus and Rhea, as well as husband and wife, king and queen of the gods.

14.390-91 Demeter bore Zeus a daughter, Persephone, and his children by Leto were Apollo and Artemis.

15.32-39 Grief for Heracles: Hera, who hated Heracles and persecuted him throughout his life, since he was the son of Zeus by a mortal woman, Alcmena, had caused a storm to blow him off his course on his return from sacking Troy. See 14.300-16, 18.139-41, 19.112-46, Introduction, p. 42.

16.278-79 The Selli / sleeping along the ground: the priests of the oracle of Zeus at Dodona were an ascetic brotherhood, sleeping on the ground and going barefoot, probably to maintain contact with the chthonic deities.

16.715-16 These lines (614-15 in the Greek) are omitted by many of the manuscripts and excised as an interpolation by many editors.

17.623 His mind had changed, at leasr for a moment: i.e., Zeus now gives victory to the Achaeans. Some scholars think it means his mind had changed about allowing the gods to intervene, but that change of mind comes late, in Book 20. “At least for a moment” is not in the Greek but seems justified since in fact Zeus changes his mind again a few lines later (672-75).

18.43-56 All the Nereids: the translation attempts to render the Homeric names of the Nereids with reference to their root meanings in the Greek. The translator has followed the lead of William Arrowsmith’s excellent version, the first in modern English to treat the passage in this way (The Craft and Context of Translation, ed. Arrowsmith and Shattuck [Austin, Tex., 1961], p. 19). In their translations of the Odyssey, W. H. D. Rouse (1937) and Robert Fitzgerald (1961) have done the same in rendering the Phaeacian princes’ names (8.111-16 in the Greek), all of them fittingly nautical for a seafaring people.

18.462 My great fall: it is not clear whether this was the fall described in 1.712- 16, or indeed whether Hephaestus’ lameness was the result of that fall or a birth defect. The point of the story is simply to provide a reason for his willingness to help Thetis.

18.569-71 The Wagon: the constellation also known as the Big Dipper and the Great Bear. As seen from the northern hemisphere, it never disappears below the horizon or, as Homer puts it, “plunge[s] in the Ocean’s baths.” The Great Bear is referred to as “she” (570) because she was originally the nymph Callisto, who ranged the woods as one of the virgin companions of the goddess Artemis. Zeus made her pregnant, and when this could no longer be concealed, Artemis changed her into a bear and killed her. Zeus in turn changed her into the constellation.

18.581-92 A quarrel had broken out: as in many tribal societies, compensation for a killing might be offered to and accepted by the victim’s relatives. (See 18.108, 21.32.) If it were not offered, the relatives would pursue the killer to exact blood for blood: his only recourse would be to go into exile, as so many of the Achaean heroes of the Iliad did (Patroclus, for example, 23.103-8, and Tlepolemus, 2.756-66). The language in this passage is ambiguous: it may mean that one side offered payment and the other refused (the interpretation we have followed) or that one man claims he has paid and the other disputes his statement.

18.595 Or share the riches with its people: i.e., they would cease hostilities if offered half the city’s wealth.

18.666 A dirge for the dying year: the Greek word is linos. This was a dirge, a mouming song, appropriate for vintage time—the end of summer. The name may have come from the Greek expression of sorrow, corresponding to our “Alas!”—ailinon. But there was also a mythical figure, Linus, a great musician, who was killed and for whom there were ceremonies of mourning.

19.106 Ruin, eldest daughter of Zeus: see note 2.130.

19.145 Born of your own stock: Perseus was the son of Zeus and Danaë. See 14.383-84 and note 2.748.

19.494 Cut down by a deathless god and mortal man: eventually, beyond the compass of the Iliad, Achilles will fall at the hands of Paris. According to legend, Paris is either assisted by Apollo—who guides a fatal arrow to Achilles’ right heel, the one vulnerable part of his body—or replaced by the god, who assumes his likeness and shoots Achilles down directly. See 22.422-24 and notes 1. 1, 3.174.

20.65-89 The sides taken by the gods are consistent with the sympathies they display throughout the poem. Hera, Athena and Poseidon have aided the Achaeans from the start. (See note 24.35-36.) Hephaestus could be expected on the same side as his mother, Hera, and Hermes, born in a cave on Mount Cyllene in central Greece, naturally favored the Achaeans. Ares, Apollo and, of course, Aphrodite, to whom the Trojan Paris gave the prize in the beauty contest, have supported the Trojans all along. Leto and Artemis are the mother and sister of Apollo, and Xanthus is the principal Trojan river.

20.174 Sea monster: see note 5.733-38.

20.220-28 The time I caught you: Achilles refers to his capture of Lymessus, the town where he acquired Briseis as his share of the booty. See 2.784-88, 19.66- 68 and 20.106-8.

20.248-79 Aeneas is to be the only survivor of the royal house of Troy, and here his lineage is established. (See the Genealogy, p. 617.) He will, as Poseidon says (355-56), “rule the men of Troy in power—/ his sons’ sons and the sons born in future years.” But Troy will be destroyed, and not rebuilt: Aeneas’ kingdom will be a new foundation. This was to be adopted by the Romans, the conquerors of Greece in the second century B.C., as their own foundation legend: Aeneas, with his son, Ascanius, and a band of Trojans who had escaped from the burning city, sailed west and landed in Italy, where Aeneas’ descendants later settled on the site that became the imperial city of Rome. Virgil’s great epic, the Aeneid, gave this legend its classic form.

20.286 A ship with a hundred benches: this would be an impossibly large ship.

21.378-79 A worthy match: since Hephaestus is a god whose element is fire, he is the obvious ally to call in against the waters of Scamander.

21.506 Those troubles we suffered here alongside Troy: see note 7.523-25.

21.551 He lets you kill off mothers in their labor: Artemis, as the goddess who presides over childbirth, causes deaths as well as safe deliveries.

22.35 Orion’s Dog: the Dog Star, Sirius, is the brightest star in the heavens (the name “Dog” is now reserved for the constellation in which it is seen—Canis Maior). This constellation appears to be close to the side of Orion, named after a mythical great hunter. Sirius ushers in the “dog days” of late summer—harvest time and a period of intense heat in Mediterranean countries, and a sickly season for their inhabitants. See 5.5, 11.70.

22.438 Stab his body: on the conduct of the Achaeans here, an ancient commentator remarked: “The emotion [of triumph] is that of a low mob, and it magnifies the greatness of the dead man.” (Cited from Griffin, p. 47.)

23.86 The river: the Styx. See note 2.858.

23.381 Tight-strung car: the front of the chariot (and some think the floor as well) consisted of a sort of mat of plaited leather straps.

23.492 Take the oath: see lines 646-50, where Menelaus challenges Antilochus to swear an oath that he did not commit a deliberate foul.

23.756 When Oedipus fell: the Greek word usually means “fell in batue”—a different fate from that of the hero of Sophocles’ play.

24.35-36 When they came to his shepherd’s fold: a reference to the legend of the Judgment of Paris. When the gods came to celebrate the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the goddess Strife threw a golden apple among the guests, announcing that it should be awarded as a prize to the most beautiful of the three goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. But no god was willing to take the responsibility of judging among them. Zeus finally appointed Paris, then minding his flocks on Mount Ida. All three of the goddesses offered him bribes. Hera promised to make him ruler of all Asia; Athena offered him wisdom and victory in all his battles; Aphrodite offered him the love of Helen, wife of Menelaus, the most beautiful woman in the world. He gave the apple to Aphrodite: the result was the Trojan War, and the undying hatred of Hera and Athena for Troy and the Trojans. (See Introduction, p. 41.) Poseidon hated Troy for a different reason: he had been cheated of his wages for building the walls of Troy by Laomedon, Priam’s father. See 21.505-22 and note 7.523-25.

24.97 Samos: the island facing Thrace, later called Samothrace.

24.487 This is the twelfth day: we translate the reading hide (line 413 in the Greek), not the êôs of the Oxford Classical Text.

24.545 To host an immortal: though Achilles and his divine mother Thetis do in fact meet face-to-face (1.422-510, 18.82-162), this is not true of most of the encounters of men and gods in the Iliad. Men meet the gods in disguise (in Book 13 Poseidon disguises himself as Calchas) or the god comes to men from behind, as Athena does to Achilles in Book 1 and Apollo to Patroclus in Book 16. In older, legendary times, however, men might entertain the gods in special circumstances: Hera, for example, reminds Apollo (at 24.74—76) that he and all the gods came to the wedding feast for the marriage of Peleus and Thetis.

Z4.613-21 The gods, presumably, are the only beings to receive unmixed portions from the jar of blessings.

24.708-27 Niobe: in the usual version of the Niobe legend, she turns into stone like the rock face on Mount Sipylus in Asia Minor, which “weeps”—i.e., water runs down it. Homer adds the detail that the people too are turned into stone to explain why they did not bury the slaughtered children who lay “nine days ... in their blood.” His most telling addition, however, is that Niobe, instead of being turned into stone immediately, dries her eyes, in effect, and turns her thoughts to food—“precisety because,” as Willcock puts it, “that is what Achilles wants Priam to do” (vol. 2, p. 319).

24.866 Hurl you headlong down from the ramparts: the very fate that. after the fall of Troy, Astyanax would meet. See Introduction, p. 37.

24.899 The twentieth year for me: it does not seem likely that Helen and Paris would have taken ten years to get to Troy in the first place and then endured ten years of siege. The expression is probably just an emotional intensification. like our expression “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times ...”